When Google and HTC announced the Nexus 9, they showed it off in the now-standard black, white, and gold "sand" color options. The off-brown color wasn't seen on launch day, though considering the low initial manufacturing runs that Nexus devices seem cursed with, that's not overly surprising. In the small hours of this morning the sand option appeared on the Play Store in the United States - you can pick up a 32GB model now for $479.

There's still no sign of it in the US, but Samsung has started pushing Lollipop to its current flagship phone in the UK. Users of the Galaxy S5 across the pond (SM-G900F) should be getting OTA notifications very soon, which means plenty of new features and some tweaks to Samsung's TouchWiz UI.

For most of us, making and receiving phone calls with our devices is something we simply take for granted. Unfortunately, Nexus 6 owners who use Sprint as their carrier are finding that it's not quite that simple.

Background

The Nexus 6 works on all five major US carriers with the simple swap of a SIM card, but that doesn't mean that all problems with the device are universal to all carriers.

When Motorola released the revamped Moto X a few months ago, there was plenty of discussion about whether it or the still-unannounced Nexus 6 would be a better purchase. It's completely reasonable to prefer the Nexus 6 because of the larger screen and improved camera, but the 2014 Moto X still stands out to me as one of the best Android phones ever made. Now that we've got a little distance, let's see how the 2014 Moto X is holding up.

The internet of things may be the most overused, annoying, comically oversimplified tech term of 2014, dreamt up by some winnovator god knows when, but it was the keystone (and keynote) of an increasingly schizophrenic CES that, in the last few years, has been searching for a more cohesive theme.

Yes, that's a carrot. At one of Lenovo's CES party / showcase nights.

CES 2015 was easily the least mobile device-focused CES since 2008, when many companies were still deciding whether or not to respond to the unexpected popularity of the first iPhone.

There's money to be made in the restaurant recommendation business. Yelp makes bank by enabling users to point other users towards good places to eat and other local establishments. Urbanspoon made a name for itself over the years doing something similar. Recently, the latter attracted the attention of Zomato, an India-based company with a presence in Asia, Europe, and South America.

Zomato announced on its blog today that it has acquired Urbanspoon, which will help it expand into the US, Canada, and Australia.

If you're a gamer, you probably know XCOM as the recently revived turn-based alien killin' strategy game. It's also been given an official board game, a natural fit for the turn-based combat so heavily featured in the digital version. Until today you needed an iOS device for the mandatory companion app, which handles such fiddly things as player turns and hit percentages - the things your DM used to do on pen and paper.

One of the continued shortcomings of Android Wear is the lack of configurable canned response messages. If you can't talk to your wrist, it really limits what you can say. For a few months, WearResponses has offered an alternative for users of rooted devices with Xposed, but the v2.0 update is rolling out today and should work on all devices without root. How? Sorcery, I'd imagine.

[email protected], at first glance, looks like a trendy name for a blog about mastering origami, but it's actually an initiative that could some day help crack the secrets behind certain life-threatening illnesses. Folding refers to the way in which proteins bend themselves into various shapes, forming the building blocks for our bones, skin, and everything in between.

Sometimes proteins don't fold correctly, leading to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's. Unfortunately, the process occurs so quickly that it's difficult for scientists to observe.